Marvels & Tales articles from April 2006

Marvels & Tales archives from April 2006

From the editors.(Marvels and Tales )(Editorial)
April 1, 2006... With this issue, Marvels & Tales begins its twentieth year of publication. When founding editor Jacques Barchilon published the journal's inaugural issue in May 1987, he declared confidently that Marvels & Tales was not "just another little...

Re-imaging the fantastic: E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Story of the Lost Reflection".(Critical essay)
April 1, 2006... During the nineteenth century, the mirror, which had been revered for centuries as an object of fascination, assumed a distinct role as an icon of bourgeois self-consciousness. Its importance as a symbol of middle-class prosperity made it a...

Princes, beasts, or royal pains: men and masculinity in the revisionist fairy tales of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2006... Most scholars of American literature consider the works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) as falling in either or both of the two following literary traditions: regional local color realism and proto-feminist writings. Among her most...

Ice, glass, snow: fairy tale as art and metafiction in the writing of A.S. Byatt.(Critical essay)
April 1, 2006... Everybody knows it's fiction, but then everybody knows the whole thing is fiction. A. S. Byatt, qtd. in Wachtel 88 The award of the Booker Prize to A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance in 1990 cemented Byatt's position as a...

This rapturous form.(Retelling Little Red et al.: Fairy Tales in Art and Literature, Museum of Modern Art )
April 1, 2006... In Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, the essay collection I edited about women and fairy tales, Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she was not aware of fairy tales' influence on her until, "along in her sixties," she came upon Sylvia Townsend Warner's...

Old Woman Magoun.(Short story)
April 1, 2006... The hamlet of Barry's Ford is situated in a sort of high valley among the mountains. Below it the hills lie in moveless curves like a petrified ocean; above it they rise in green-cresting waves which never break. It is Barry's Ford because at...

The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, 3 vols.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. By Hans-Jorg Uther. FF Communications no. 284. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004. Three volumes: 619 pp.,...

American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... American Folktales from the Collections of the Library of Congress. Edited by Carl Lindahl. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Two vols. 729 pp. As Peggy A. Bulger announces in the foreword, this is "a major contemporary publication that...

Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales.(The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, 2d ed.)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. By Jack Zipes. Revised and expanded edition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. 278 pp. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. By Jack...

Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec. By Marilena Papachristophorou. FF Communications 279. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2002. 337 pp. This work taps into two impressive sources of folktale scholarship. First, the...

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. By Marina Warner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 264 pp. Stories of metamorphosis "in poetry, art, and fictions, born at moments of historical and cultural...

Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. By Maria Tatar. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. xiv + 247 pp., bibliography, index, illustrations. The story of Bluebeard, the mysterious character with...

Rushdie in Wonderland: Fairytaleness in Salman Rushdie's Fiction.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Rushdie in Wonderland: Fairytaleness in Salman Rushdie's Fiction. By Justyna Deszcz. European University Studies: Series 14: Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, vol. 405. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004. 199 pp. Readers on the lookout for...

Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Edited by Donald Haase. Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 268 pp. "As I have sketched it, the agenda for feminist fairy-tale scholarship parallels in large...

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. By Valerie Paradiz. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 222 pp., bibliography, and index. This book "is about the forgotten and unknown women of the Grimms' fairy tales, the social...

Little Black Book of Stories.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Little Black Book of Stories. By A. S. Byatt. New York: Vintage International, 2005. 240 pp. Once upon a time I met a man who told me that he bad seen a person turn into stone. He had been six years old, sitting alone on the front porch of...

Critical exchanges.
April 1, 2006... Fairy-tale studies are made especially interesting by the controversies that inevitably accompany them. Accordingly, Marvels & Tales will publish critical exchanges between readers and authors. Concise, professional responses that augment,...